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Gmail: The April Fool’s Day Release That Was No Joke

Illustration: Daniel NyariGoogle famously publicizes gag products on April Fool’s Day (remember 8-bit maps? YouTube DVDs?), but despite a release date of April 1, 2004, its webmail service was no joke. Gmail debuted on an invitation-only basis, forcing us to beg friends with newly minted gmail.com addresses for precious invites. And once we were in, we experienced something miraculous — a spam-free inbox with a killer integrated search tool and a gigabyte of gratis storage. What’s more, it was built using Ajax, a JavaScript hack that lets web pages update without reloading. Ajax had been kicking around on the web’s bleeding edge, but most sites still used Flash or Java for interactivity. Gmail took it mainstream, giving webmail a slick snappiness more akin to a desktop application and leaving clunky old Hotmail in the dust. New messages just appeared, chat windows popped up instantly — all without a browser refresh. Today we all expect websites to behave like real applications. Another concept made familiar by Gmail: trading privacy for services. Skeptics objected to Google machine-reading our emails to improve its ad-targeting science, but the rest of us didn’t care. After all, it does so much, and it doesn’t cost a dime.